At 02:53 AM 2/14/01 -0600, Sam TH wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 14, 2001 at 08:28:15AM +0000, Hubert Figuiere wrote:
>> Sam TH écrit:
>> > I think the idea would be to take the wmf image, convert it to png
>> > using libwmf and associated tools, and then display it in abiword via
>> > the png display mechanism.  
>> 
>> Please. Not as PNG but as SVG. WMF is inherently a vector format (like any 
>> metafile), so SVG is IMHO the most natural format we should convert to.
>
>Right.  SVG is the perfect format to display WMF in, and is what we
>should use.

Definitely.  We've said all along that we need two and only two native 
graphics formats for AbiWord:

  PNG for raster images, and 
  SVG for vector images.  

That allows core Abi logic to just port those two imaging models to all our 
supported graphics environments.  Likewise, importing other formats are 
radically simplified, because you just have to map to them to one of these 
two. 

Then in our file format, all raster images get stored as base64-encoded PNGs 
and all vector images get stored as SVGs.  Very clean and very simple.  

>> Don't we support SVG ? 
>
>Not yet.  Work was started on this, but never finished.  Interested
>folk should look at gr_VectorImage.cpp, and at a number of emails from
>Justin Bradford that are in the archives.  
>
>This would be really cool to have.  

Indeed.  Would someone be willing to write this up as "POW -- Add SVG 
support"?  As mentioned previously, SVG is a big spec, but all we really 
need is something between:

  - the existing GR_Graphics feature set
  - the WMF feature set

This would be a very useful subset to sneak into an upcoming release, and 
enough to attract developers to add more of SVG later as needed.  

Plus which, it'll allow us to get started on embedding and XML namespace 
issues, since the contents of the SVG data blocks in our file format will 
need to be ignored and handed off to another parser.  

Paul

PS:  To honor our GNOME heritage, I was tempted to suggest that the POW be 
labelled "Add SVG support, dangit!", but I'm not sure everyone would get the 
joke.  :-)

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